"further loss of quality" for a JPG only makes sense if you edit the photo in an editing suite, make changes and save it again, and choose JPG deliberately. Storing, copying, and viewing JPG files doesn't change them at all. Converting to PNG just gives you a PNG that looks exactly like the JPG. So if you've got jpg photos then you can just leave them as JPGs and not worry about any loss of quality: the loss of quality was a one-time thing when the file was first created.

The only time they can get further degraded is if you open them in a photo-editing program, and save them again as a lossy format, especially if the format isn't exactly the same as the original JPG, or if you make changes such as applying filters to the whole image, or cropping it (since that usually throws the JPG blocks out of alignment). The rule of thumb here is to just leave your image files alone as whatever format they happen to be in, but remember to choose PNG for saving, when you edit pictures in a paint program. It makes literally zero difference if you convert them to PNG before editing.

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Some of the new AI-based filters might help out in the near future. The premise is that they train the AI on millions of "sample" pairs of high-quality / low-quality versions of the same images, teaching it to repair the damage on the low-quality images so that they look as much like the high-quality images as possible.

You can then use the resultant neural network to clean up other images. However, the closer the training set resembles the data you wish to clean, the better. e.g. if you had low-quality JPGs of anime images, and wanted to upscale them while removing JPG compression artifacts, you'd want to get a huge number of high-quality anime images, downscale them, then convert to JPG, with as close to the same settings as possible as the images you wish to clean up. Then teach an NN to reverse that specific degradation for that specific class of images, and you'd have a custom filter which was really, really good at repairing images exactly like those ones.

EDIT the concept here is that if you teach an NN to upscale images of e.g. ... WWII planes, then it becomes really good at working out what WWII planes are meant to look like, so when you give it a new image of an unknown WWII plane, it fills in missing details intelligently, rather than just using a generic upscale filter. Sure, it will still upscale other types of things and might do passably ok, but it's going to be really good at the class of things it was trained on. In the future there might even be intelligent online filters that work out what something is, e.g. object and edge-detection, then apply specifically trained filters to subregions of the photo which hold those things. e.g. if there's a blurry plane and a blurry tree, it could apply different upscale filters to both regions of the photo, and do better than applying only one filter to the whole photograph.

JPEG has a configurable option at compression time to determine the quantization matrix. (EG, how much data to cut out using the quantizer). This is usually given the name "Quality".

When people make images for the web, they usually want to make the file size as tiny as possible, which means they crank the quantizer really hard (turn quality really low). The result is really noticeable artifacts.

It is important to understand what an artifact is, and how it gets generated. JPEG looks for edges inside a fixed rectangle 'tile' of the image, then averages the pixels that do not meet edge threshold, and have similar color values. The issue, is that the average of one tile, and another, (especially with a very high quantization value) can be noticeably different. This creates a rectangular artifact.

When the quantizer is not set on "Mangle! DEATH TO QUALITY!" settings, JPEG does not look that bad on natural images. However, hosting companies dont want to pay for people downloading a 300kb jpeg on every visit. Instead, they want users to download 30kb jpeg on every visit. (Or smaller!!). So, they set the quantizer to MANGLE! and go on.

Most cameras (most..... ...) dont set the quantizer on MANGLE when they generate the jpeg from the CCD array's output. They still produce artifacts, just not really horrible ones. They only show up on post processing because the tile boundaries are what they are, and averages are averages. If you try to enhance edges, the edges between tiles will also be enhanced, for some algorithms. This makes JPEG undesirable for professional photography, and why professional cameras have the option to save as RAW.

Ah, I see. I was under the impression .jogs decrepited every time you copied them. How else would pics on the webs artifactify?

A normal copy is the same size and is digitally identical to the original, like copying any other type of file.

The degradation could happen if a site is storing all images in lossy formats, but then they decided to re-format the files with higher compression to reduce bandwidth costs. That would compound the problem: the new format is more lossy than the old one, but it's also not working from a clean version, but from another lossy version.

e.g. say the first filter lost 10% of detail, and the second filter lost 20% of detail (with linear reduction of file size). If you applied filter 1 to a raw image, you have 10% loss, and if you apply filter 2 to an image you have 20% loss. However, say you didn't store original images anywhere, to save space, then apply filter 2 to images that already used filter 1, then you're down to 72% detail, but the real kicker is that the file still takes up the same amount of space as one with only 20% detail loss created from the original file.

So, not storing original clean images actually backfires in terms of bandwidth, since if you always convert from 100% perfect copies you can compress the resultant images to smaller sizes for less perceptual loss of detail compared to trying to shrink an already-shrunk image.

"further loss of quality" for a JPG only makes sense if you edit the photo in an editing suite, make changes and save it again, and choose JPG deliberately. Storing, copying, and viewing JPG files doesn't change them at all. Converting to PNG just gives you a PNG that looks exactly like the JPG. So if you've got jpg photos then you can just leave them as JPGs and not worry about any loss of quality: the loss of quality was a one-time thing when the file was first created.

Anyway, VLC media player and discord are starting to show the same kind of issue now. Can someone offer me a solution this time, rather than a joke please. This is pretty serious, I won't be able to play videos or game online with my friends now. Audio still works fine in VLC so I assume it's some sort of bug with the way windows is displaying images.

I also highly recommend mpv as a media player. It has customizable decoder and renderer settings so you can change hardware vs software decoding etc. It's worth a shot if nothing in VLC is working, since there are many more options here. You can use it raw or get it bundled with a front-end / library manager type deal (there are about 10 different projects to choose from, seek wikipedia). But I just use the vanilla version.

It's not an "installer" app, just extract it to a folder, right click on your video, then use Windows "open with" to find mpv.exe. however it does a shitload of things most players won't let you do. It's also incredibly good at not completely sucking if you need to run it on old hardware. (though they dropped XP support a while ago so if you need XP version ask me for the last compatible build).

e.g. I built an old machine for someone else, some high-end videos wouldn't play because they couldn't be decoded fast enough, so I put mpv on there, turned on decoder frame-skipping, plus renderer-frame-skipping, and a third option that occasionally resyncs the video by force, and then the videos would play and not fall out of sync. No fucking chance of VLC working correctly for something like that, which is the very reason I dumped VLC originally, for mplayer2 (precursor to mpv). mplayer2 just worked correctly, after setting a couple of options, for videos which were horrendously broken in VLC, no matter what I did.

BTW it's the extreme in minimalism, but has a ton of really cool customization features. e.g. there's no windows/menu system, but you get complete control of what every single key combo does, plus an optional OSD (but you don't need it). Border-less, titlebar-less, menu-less. It's the most minimal media player on the planet. You can just make it this floating video with nothing else, e.g. fit it in a corner of the screen, put a browser on the other side and an open folder below it. For your case, it allows you to specific software or hardware decoding, or opengl vs directx rendering. Having a choice of render might allow you to get around system issues if there's some sort of directX flaw. It's worth a shot, and mpv is a killer app.

There are an absolute ton of customization options, global, per-folder and per-file config scripts, and it's extremely lightweight, fast and portable. as some examples of mpv, I reprogrammed my arrow keys to do seeking, left/right is +-2 seconds, up/down +- 5 minutes. While holding ctrl+arrow means left/right is 10 seconds, up/down is 20 minutes, and shift+arrow left/right is +-1 minute, and up/down is +- 1 hour. So i can seek to specific frames extremely quickly (<> do forward and backward by frame).

Also, you can set speed in a config file, e.g. you could have all videos play 110% speed by default (to save time on every video without it being too noticeable), but put a config file in your music video folder to make those ones play at 100% speed only. You can set which audio, video and subtitle track is chosen for each file, on a global, folder or file basis. You can also make the program run borderless, and on a double-left click (or F) toggles between a smaller size and full-screen, but you can customize it to go to a specific location on the screen. e.g. I have global videos playing in the top-right, but I have a folder full of videos I was edited, so I set any video in that folder to auto-play in the top-left of the screen. So I have shows I'm watching top-right automatically, and videos I want to edit (using mpv to find the frames for advert removal from a dvr) play in the top-left of the screen.

And there are about a bajillion other customization thingies I use, and another bajillion ones I've never used.

Running Gabriel Knight in DosBox. Upon flipping the light switch in the museum, the game crashed. However, it worked normally (...if whatever that noise was is considered 'normal') when I tried to reproduce it.

Logged

"Continue struggling, laws of physics be darned." - NRDL"What, are you stupid or something? Every one of the snake's bones is crushed! Its internal organs are torn apart! There is no way you can - (6) You resuscitate the snake."- Gatleos

Just recently I've started using my main computer on wi-fi (normally I use wired connection) because of a roof leak where I normally have it. It has a horrible connection to the wifi, while other computers/my phone don't seem to suffer issues. Youtube drops constantly, I often can't visit simple webpages (posting this from my much older laptop) and online games, which I'd like to be using it for, are just out of the question.

-I'm using an old-ish PCIe card. The drivers are up to date as far as I can tell.-Wireless routers are quite new, and I think part of a meshing system which might be part of the problem-The network seems to drop and reconnect often, sometimes every few seconds-Sometimes the connection dialogue say's I'm connected only on IPv4 or IPv6, but not both-Pinging to router gives mostly short ping times, but also a lot of random very high ping times or timeouts

I feel like I've tried everything and I have no idea why it's acting like this. Any suggestions?